In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer running from tech or science news to economics; from firearms to the world at large.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

For My Fellow Florida Gunnies

Full disclosure: a couple of years ago, the NRA had life memberships on sale for much lower than usual (someone may have been picking up part of the cost) and I became a life member. That may color your reaction to this, so let me "lead with my chin" and put it up here.

Ammoland is reporting that there's an out of state group representing themselves as Florida Gun Rights lobbying Florida gun owners by email. Personally, I haven't gotten one of these solicitations, but the source is Marion Hammer, former NRA president, and one of the gunnies' best lobbyists in the state.

Once again email is flooding to Florida gun owners from an entity
calling itself “Florida Gun Rights” (FLGR) asking that gun owners send
email to Florida Legislators about a nonexistent bill.

These
alerts are not coming from a grassroots group in Florida, their
corporate documents clearly show their principal place of business is
Colorado.

Once again they are claiming there is a “Backyard Range Ban” bill. Make no mistake, there is NO SUCH BILL.

The specifics about it being a bill seem to be a technicality (which is all that lawyers live for) because they go on to say,

HB-41 adds a subsection (4) to existing law to prohibit the discharge of
firearms in residential neighborhoods that have a density of one or
more dwellings per acre.

I could see how this could be construed to be a Backyard Range Ban bill, rather than an addition to existing law 790.15, but that's not the point. The point is that if you're going to donate to a Florida gun rights group, I'd personally rather donate to one that's really in Florida, not Colorado. It's why I'm a member of Florida Carry.

FLGR is not incorporated as a nonprofit Florida corporation. FLGR is
registered as Florida LLC (normally a for-profit small business). Their
single purpose seems to be conning you (regardless of your political
party) into sending them money.

The Ammoland article alleges that FLGR is a PO Box for NAGR, which appears to be the case according to the Update section of this article in a South Florida news service. I've given to NAGR in the past, but stopped doing so when it turned out that "nagger" was a pretty good descriptor. They may be a decent group, but they send a begging request once a day.

These people are the ones that screwed the vote in Colorado when they were trying to raise the magazine capacity from 15 to 30. They managed to piss enough legislators off with their antics that the bill went nowhere.And yes, no capacity restriction would have been better, but you get what you can today and keep fighting. This morons are a frigging danger.

I know that there's appeal in being the "no compromise gun rights organization", but like you say Colorado gun owners almost got rid of over 90% of the painful restrictions except for these guys essentially blocking it. I don't like the restrictions either, but I can't see where saying I want fewer restrictions is bad. Yeah, it's not NO restrictions, but I can't see where it's better to live under draconian restrictions than getting them eased up.

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About Me

Retired radio engineer, follower of Christ, RF designer, mentor. Radio ham, home shop machinist, lapidary, silversmith, roadie cyclist, learning to be a rifleman, and home defender, - a guy with too many interests to keep track of.

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